"When I remember that dizzy summer, that dull, stupid, lovely, dire summer, it seems that in those days I ate my lunch…"

"It is always so simple, and so complicating, to accept an apology."

"I saw that I'd been mistaken when I thought of myself as a Wall, because a wall stands between, and holds apart, two …"

"Riding on a city bus along the route that you have taken from your job, from the movies, from a hundred Chinese meals…"

"The sky glowed and flashed orange, off toward the mills in the south, as if volcano gods were fighting there or, it s…"

"As a child, coming home at sunset through the infinite chain of backyards that led from the schoolyard to our house, …"

"She was unquestionably beautiful, and yet there was something odd, wrong, about her looks, her clothing: something a …"

"My worst nightmare was a boring nightmare, the dream of visiting an empty place where nothing happened, with awful sl…"

"My first thirteen years, years of ecstatic, uncomfortable, and speechless curiosity, followed by six months of disast…"

"An alcoholic is nothing if not sensitive to the proper time and place for his next drink; his death is one of the mos…"